I am writing to thank you
for your sacrifices, for I
am your great American
granddaughter and today
is a hopeful day here
in the United States of America.
Aside from ceaseless
labor, I imagine they expected
little of a girl like you in Mitau
in the Duchy of Kurland, settled
by Teutonic Knights but taken
under Russian control in 1872,
when you, great Bubbe, were born. I know
they didn’t teach you to read or let you
vote or choose your mate.
But today I’m thinking about others in Mitau
for whom life may have been harder still.
Bubbe – did you have a confirmed
village bachelor or maybe a pair
of spinster roommates living
in a cottage on the fringe
of town, and did a whisper follow them
whenever they dared walk through
the shtetl square: faygele, faygele?
Bubbe – did you ever see an African
with black, black skin, and hear a different
ugly Yiddish whisper close behind?
And when the Cossacks came to town,
did an ugly whisper sometimes follow
you too?
Well, please sit down because I want you
to know that whatever happened
in Mitau, today the highest court
of our land granted homosexuals
the right to marry.
Today, great Bubbe, was also my fifth
of twenty days of grand-jury duty
in the unified court system here
in downtown New York County, where
in our jury room beside my small Jewish self
sits a man who, on our breaks, reads
on an electronic book called a Kindle
in lovely Arabic script, and on my other side sits
an African-American woman who is an attorney,
and in the row behind us, two women with two
strong accents have linked arms in fast friendship:
a shy young Asian and a Jamaican grandma.
They taught me to read, Bubbe, they taught me well,
so I can tell you about our African-American president
who gave two speeches today, one a eulogy for a pastor
slain in his sanctuary by the kind of hatred bred
by ignorance, which may be the only kind. The other
speech commemorated the ruling on what we call
gay marriage, the ruling that, frankly, seemed just as
unimaginable to most of us as it must seem to you.
Today, said the president, our union is a little more
perfect.
On day one, Kevin, the warden of our jury room, gave us
a tour of our corner of the criminal court. “Here are the
vending machines that sell Pepsi products,” he joked.
“The ones that sell Coca-Cola products are segregated
at the far end of the hall,” and I despaired for my nation
as I so often do, and I know that you cannot begin
to understand what I’m telling you.
But maybe it’s true after all, great Bubbe,
what our slain leader King said, invoking the words of a
Unitarian reverend American Transcendentalist abolitionist
fourteen years before you were born: the arc of the universe
is long, but it bends toward justice.
Every day when Kevin lets us jurors go I walk
from the courthouse to my parked bicycle
unencumbered by ankle chains or even
ankle-length skirts, and Bubbe, no whispers
ever follow me, and today I can almost believe
the day will come when no whispers
will follow anyone.
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